Sept 27 th, 8pm at Ventnor Exchange

Eclectic Entertainments Presents 'Foes' with a Cast of Many

Laura Reid singing a selection of her carelully selected foeful material as well as holding the evening together;

Matt Hitt palying one of his own compositions;

John Armstrong fighting off his confrontational and miserablist tendencies.>

Admission is a mere £5 for over two hours of a different kind of entertainment.

Profiles

Doris Dolally endeavours to create 'awkward in her perfomances. On production of one such Andy Kauffman inspired performance one friend actually said 'Wow, I know no one else that could do that'. You may think that we are implying here that it was great. We are not. Just that Doris has a strong stomach for discomfort. She is among the very few who embrace the fact that if you expect nothing, you will never be disappointed. On her second ever performance John Armstrong introduced her with 'Please welcome Doris Doolally, I cannot be responsible for the carnage that will follow' Please expect bad humour, poor performance and a level of awkward only rivalled by the British need to be polite and applaud. Expect excessive disappointment, melancholia and a keen dense of quietly anarchic destruction

Laura has been a pianist for 30 years (and should be better by now, really) a song writer for 20 years and an attention seeker for Much Longer Than That. She currently teaches singing and song writing to young people with additional needs and, as part of the renowned Ventnor Darlings plays regularly at Bestival, IOW Festival, Ventnor Fringe Festival and at other local events and dens of iniquity.

She is a member of the Ventnor Fringe Review media team, has toured Germany as session pianist/vocalist with The Lion and The Wolf, hosted International Women's Day as part of Reading Between the Lines and supported the development and delivery of a song writing and music production project in Tottenham post riots, working with teenagers vulnerable to gang recruitment.

John Armstrong is a writer and performer who has scribbled extensively on the poetry of J H Prynne, Paul Celan, Sir Geoffrey Hill and David Jones. He considers himself to be a documentarist performer in the manner of Caroline Bergvall and also works in collaboration with composers Radu Malfatti and Matt Hitt in producing neo-avant blends of music and voice. He's been producing various gigs on the Isle of Wight for the last five years with an emphasis on promoting original material. John has recently discovered clownery and is especially keen to inflict his clocking skills on the hapless audience.

Matt Hitt is a musician and artist whose tastes range from the experimental to the banal. His main areas of interest are in contemporary clarinet performance and interactive installation art that explores the ideas of the viewer as collaborator. Lately Matt has been working alongside John Armstrong producing innovative minimalist works combining spoken voice and clarinet and also has recently made a return to a more pure form of composition using traditional instrumentation.

When not embracing his pretentious, artistic side, he spends his time as one half of comedy cabaret act The Ventnor Darlings, where he has plenty of opportunity to sing all sorts of awfully brilliant songs while wearing inappropriately tight trousers.